This quote highlights one of the major issues faced by women in the movie industry – the lack of complex, fully-developed female characters and the frequent sidelining of women's stories in favor of male-driven narratives. The film industry has long been criticized for its gender imbalances, including the underrepresentation of women in acting and directing roles and the frequent awarding of prizes to men. Witherspoon's comments speak to the need for greater representation and equal opportunities for women in Hollywood. In an effort to understand the gender gap in the movie industry, we will use the CMU Movie Summary Corpus dataset to examine the representation of women in movie plots, principal roles, lexical fields, awards nominees, and winners.

First insights on gender gap

From the studied datasets, the overall proportion of female vs. male movie characters and actors looks like this.

We could stop here and say that YES indeed, the cinema industry exhibits a gender gap. But data analysis is never that simple… To have a real insight on gender (in)equality on screen and on set, we worked around different axes around the topic of women representation. Women representation is described in various ways. Firstly, are women numerically present? Then, what are women associated with and how do we talk about these women? What kind of roles and jobs women do are the most appreciated by the public and by the industry itself? And finally, how do women interact with others?

Examining movie plots allows us to analyze the prevalence of feminine and masculine pronouns to understand the representation of each gender on screen, as summaries are the direct representation of the movie itself. Our analysis shows that there is a significant difference between the occurrence of feminine and masculine pronouns in the summaries, with feminine pronouns appearing in only 70% of summaries and masculine pronouns appearing in 89% of them. This suggests that there may be a disparity in the representation of men and women in these movies.

Women undergo stereotypes: they are often expected to be accommodating and emotional, while men are usually expected to be self-confident and aggressive. But how are these stereotypes, about women and men, translated into movies?

Women will most probably be present in movie genres such as Romance film, Comedy and Drama, while men are mostly seen in Action, Adventure and Crime fiction. We also see a lot of men in Romance movies because well, for a romance to take place, two people (often a guy and a girl) are needed.

Looking at movie summaries can be very informative on the way women and men are described. Looking at words often associated with women that differ from words associated with men, “love” is the first one. So cliché right… In order to deepen our analysis, we looked at words directly associated with the main character. More precisely, we focused on words located 2 words apart from the name of the main character, which leaves us with the following textual analysis.

When talking about men, usually masculine words are used. We find the words “father” and “son” for example. When talking about women, both feminine and also masculine attributes are used. For female characters, both “father” and “mother”, as well as “son” and “daughter” are often used. This imposes the idea that female characters are created to support male characters, as Whiterspoon describes in her interview, or that they can not exist by themselves. For men, we quickly find nouns such as “kill”, “police”, which are associated with violent topics. For women, nouns and adjectives such as “love”, “beautiful”, and “marry” are present. The 3rd most used adjective for women is “pregnant”, while not a majority of female characters are pregnant in movies. It makes the viewers associate ideas of love, sweetness and motherhood to women. Finally, there are more action verbs used to describe male characters. This reinforces the idea that male characters are active protagonists and that female characters are more passive.

The appreciation of a movie, through ratings and votes of viewers for example, attest to the quality of a movie from the point of view of the audience. Ratings can be impacted by the casting, the soundtrack, the scene. The mean rating for movies with a female main character lies around 6.03/10 while the mean rating for male main character movies is 6.14/10. What does this suggest ? On average, movies with a male main character received 40% more votes than movies with a female main character. This could be an indicator that at first sight, people are more attracted to watching a film with a man in the lead role. The gender gap in the movie industry is not limited to the representation of characters on screen, but also extends to the recognition and opportunities afforded to those working behind the scenes. For example, the Academy Awards, considered as one of the most prestigious awards in the film industry, honors not only actresses or actors but also directors, songwriters or movie engineers. The plot below shows the number of male and female nominees at the Academy Awards in various categories. It indicates that there is a potential gender bias in the movie industry, as the number of male and female nominees is not balanced. It is worth noting that in many categories, the number of female nominees is significantly lower compared to their male counterparts. In fact, in only a few categories, such as costume design and makeup and hairstyling, is the number of male and female nominees roughly comparable.

From the 20 plots above, we can see really fascinating data – how the sentiments have changed for different genres over the years. Think about any movie you’ve watched: are there negative sentiments of anger? Most likely, you answered yes to that question. That’s right, the most eye-catching observation is that anger is the dominating sentiment in most of the plots. Can we then make a conclusion that movies with a lot of sentiments of anger are successful? We will examine that question in the next part below. After anger, fear and joy are the next biggest ones while love, sadness and surprise are the lowest sentiment values in every plot. However, after the huge amount of anger and fear, people love happy sentiments too! An interesting observation is that joy has increased over the recent years in many genres, for instance in adventure, action, romance, war, comedy, animation. Thus, people want more movies, which are easy and fun to watch – movies that leave a good feeling after watching. For example, we can notice that from the romance genre, where joy has greatly increased and catched up with anger. We can all relate to that happy feeling after watching a cheesy romantic movie with a lot of joy! In fantasy movies, there is not as clear a difference of the sentiments than in some other genres when anger, fear and joy are mixed together. This makes complete sense since for fantasy movies, it's very typical that the topic areas vary a lot and from the same genre one can find totally different movies. People love negative sentiments as anger and fear are still the general sentiments of many genres. Thus, an interesting question is: what will be the situation in the future? The overall trend that can be seen from the plots is that in many cases, anger is decreasing and joy is increasing. Potentially, moviegoers have started to be bored of the continuous violence and anger of the movies from the 1980s?

Our analysis suggests that the film industry remains heavily male-dominated, but there are signs of progress in the representation of women. One way to measure the gender gap in films is through the Bechdel test, which highlights the over-representation of masculine protagonists or the under-representation of women protagonists. This score is mainly computed based on the interaction between protagonists of the same and of different gender, for example by assessing whether a film features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. The Bechdel test is named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced the concept in a 1985 comic strip. It is not a definitive measure of a film's quality or feminist credentials, but it does provide a simple way to identify films that may have limited or stereotypical portrayals of women. The Bechdel score goes from 0 to 3, zero being the worst mark in terms of women representation, and 3 being the highest score that attest of gender quasi-equality. Dubious indicates an uncertainty concerning the grading.